The first phase of any socio-environmental impact assessment is the detailed investigation of the context where the project is to be carried out. How best to articulate this context into socio-environmental dimensions and indicators has long been the subject of complex debates in the field. This paper attempts to advance this articulation, suggesting a number of contextual indicators based on the principal theories embracing environmental multidimensionality in measuring systems. We discuss the indicators chosen and the issues encountered in building this approach. Subsequently we assess the capacity of this set of contextual indicators to afford insights into the particularities of the golf-course-based tourist-urban development model (GBP). We set out to test the hypothesis that local contexts can be distinguished from each other via the impacts of the GBP model. To this end we perform a main components analysis of 16 socio-environment context indicators, using municipal data from a total of 59 coastal municipalities, i.e. the whole coast of Andalusia (Spain). Our findings show with acceptable clarity that the local socio-environmental context is marked by the development of GBP, revealing a battery of factors that, in the geopolitical area studied (Spain, south-west Europe), are especially sensitive to this type of tourist-urban development.